Categories

The Archives

Posts Tagged ‘lessons’

Attention Funnel: Name that Judge (Gameshow in which Contestants compete to name the Judge)

Introduction:

Locate the Story

There are many movies that have capitalized on reliving the same moment over and over again.

Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray, was one of the first to follow this design.

In this movie, Bill Murray plays a character who finds that he is forced to live the same day over and over again as a weatherman covering the festivities at Groundhog Day.

More recently, Source Code starred Jake Gyllenhaal as a soldier who wakes up in someone else’s body on a train and has 8 minutes to locate a bomb and the bomber.

The idea in these movies is that the same cycle plays over and over again with small changes happening each time.

The book of Judges follows a similar concept… it is made up of a double prologue, main section, and double epilogue. The main section is basically a cycle that repeats itself 6 times.

The people disobey God by worshipping idols, they are oppressed and enslaved by surrounding nations, they cry out to God, God sends a deliver (a judge), the people have rest and peace, and the cycle starts all over again.

The book shows us how the people of Israel sink further and further into moral depravity and chaos as each cycle gets a little worse.

The Judges start with Othniel – a godly man and gifted leader and end with Samson – who is basically your drunk uncle with superhuman strength.

The book of Judges is mainly a book about God, his unfaithful people, and how he responds to their unfaithfulness.

I would love to give a survey right now and ask you all to rank how stressed you feel… on a scale of one to ten.

Research would say that a majority of you would write down a 5.8 out of ten. Which might seem okay, until you realized that’s the highest average of any age group.

A survey taken by the American Psychological Association found that as of 2013 teenagers were the most stressed-out group in the United States…

55 percent teens said they experience Moderate Stress (somewhere between a 4 and 7). 27 percent of teens said they experience extreme stress (8-10) during the school year, and only 18 percent said they experience low stress (1-3).

You may be skeptical of statistics, like me… but there is some other evidence that teens are really stressed out.

One of the most common answers I’ve heard from teens to the question, “How are you doing?” is “I’m stressed” or “I’m Busy.”

And one of the most popular songs from 2015 was a song called Stressed Out – By Twenty-One Pilots.

The Song didn’t just become popular because Twenty-One Pilots were trending… it’s because people can identify with it

The whole point of the song is that life is overwhelming and Tyler and Josh are stressed out.

Phrases like… “Now I’m insecure and I care what you think,” “Wish we could turn back time to the good old days,” “Out of student loans and tree-house homes we would all take the latter”

People can identify with that! We’re stressed out and we wish we could go back to a life that was much more simple

Tonight I want to look at a short story out of the book of Luke in order to tackle this topic of stress – The Story of Mary and Martha

I want to show you some of the ways we often cause ourselves undo stress, along with some ways of dealing with stress, and ending with the one thing that is most important for us to do.

Some thoughts after our Senior High Retreat, Uncovered–Every Scar has a Story:

Dave Brandt is the most intentional guy I know. While I played for him at Messiah, there wasn’t a second of practice that wasn’t planned with a strategic purpose. We didn’t do things simply do things for the sake of doing them; there was a goal that we were working toward. And Dave got results. A lot of results. Perhaps one he didn’t consider would be how his players would end up replicating his kind of intentionality within their own spheres of influence long after their Messiah Soccer days. (more…)